Eroding islands, disappearing glaciers, lots of greenhouse gases

By Ned Rozell

Published: January 27, 2012

The latest meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in
December 2011 featured hundreds of talks about Earth science, some of those
relating to Alaska (and some of those comprehensible to a non-scientist).
Here are a few items from the notebook I carried around the Moscone Center:

An Aleutian Island morphs at high speed: Chris Waythomas of the Alaska
Volcano Observatory in Anchorage spoke of how Kasatochi Island in the
Aleutians has changed in diameter since its explosive 2008 eruption.
"Erosion by wave action has eaten away the coast at about (1,000 feet) per
year. This may be a world record," he said. That¹s about three feet of
shoreline disappearing every day.

Waythomas also noted that the northern part of the island has lost about 70
percent of the ash and mud deposited by the eruption four years ago, but
that the ocean deposited much of it to the south end of the island. "It
should be three or four more years until Kasatochi gets to its original
size."

Canada ice on the wane: Glaciologist Garry Clarke of the University of
British Columbia said that the portion of the St. Elias Range in Canada will
lose half its volume of ice by the year 2100, and almost all the ice in the
north and central Rocky Mountains in Canada will be gone by then. "We're
going to be witness during the next century to the disappearance of glaciers
in western North America," Clarke said.

Double the midges on northern river: A second generation of midges hatched
last summer along a stretch of the Kuparik River. Normally, only one
generation per summer of the small flies emerges from that water, said
Michael Kendrick of the University of Alabama. He said scientists once added
nutrients to that section of river during a study, but he¹s not sure if
that, a longer ice-free season, or both made the midges spawn twice as many
generations as before.

Atigun squirrels get a jump on summer: Brian Barnes of the University of
Alaska Fairbanks' Institute of Arctic Biology reported on two groups of
ground squirrels that he and his colleagues have been studying for years on
Alaska's North Slope. Because of high winds in Atigun Gorge, a group of
ground squirrels there has early access to leaves, berries and mushrooms
that squirrels at snow-covered Toolik Lake do not have. "They don¹t wait for
greenup," Barnes said of the Atigun squirrels, which emerge from hibernation
two weeks earlier than Toolik squirrels. ³"wo weeks is a long time in the
Arctic."

We are still emitting too much carbon dioxide: James Hansen, the Director of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, shared a
message about carbon dioxide at a press conference. He said our releases of
the greenhouse gas are ³overwhelming.²

"The C02 we¹re putting in the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning will stay in
the atmosphere a long time before it can be put back into carbonate at the
sea floor," he said. "That tells us we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels
(that remain to be extracted from the Earth). If we burn all the fossil
fuels, we would send our planet back into the ice-free state . . . If we¹re
hoping to maintain a planet that looks like the one humanity has known,
we¹re out of time. We¹ve got to turn (carbon dioxide emissions) around."

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute,
University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research
community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.